On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580Quotes
You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.
—Walter Bagehot, 1863A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.
—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.
—Charles de Gaulle, 1963It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
—Tacitus, c. 117Envy is the basis of democracy.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.
—Che Guevara, 1968Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944